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← GTM Fundamentals

Lesson 3 of 8

Triggers, When It Fires

A trigger tells a tag when to run. You attach one or more triggers to a tag, and GTM fires it the moment a matching condition occurs.

Page viewClickForm submitTriggerthe whenTagfires

Trigger types you'll meet

  • Page View family, Consent Initialization, Page View, DOM Ready, Window Loaded.
  • Clicks, All Elements or Just Links, scoped by Click Text, Classes or URL.
  • Forms, Form Submission and the form-interaction pattern.
  • Engagement, Scroll Depth, Element Visibility, Timer, YouTube Video.
  • Custom Event, fires on a named event in the dataLayer, and History Change for SPAsSPASingle-Page App: a site that changes content and URL without a full browser page reload (e.g. React, Next.js, Vue)..

Triggers can also be conditional: add filters so a tag only fires on a specific path, and add exception (blocking) triggers to stop it firing in certain cases. Exceptions always win over firing triggers.

Key takeaway

A trigger is the "when." Pick the trigger type that matches the interaction, then narrow it with conditions and exceptions.